Messrs Blair and Brown just don't get it. They think good social policy revolves around a bad definition of 'poverty'. They are puzzled by the 'hoodies'.
This from a good article by Fraser Nelson in the Scotsman:
For all the hype about the New Deal, Brown’s economy has specialised in finding alternatives to work for young people. When Labour came to power, 23% of 18-24 years olds were not working: this has risen to now 25%.And benefit dependency has risen from 6.01m when Labour came to power to 6.58m now. Family disintegration has continued apace: the proportion of births to lone parents is up from 21% in 1996 to 26% today.
Yet in Brown’s eyes, this doesn’t matter: more subsidy is going to the poorest, ergo "inequality" is statistically reduced, ergo things must be okay. Labour is blinded to the second part of Clinton’s equation: poverty is a social phenomenon. Family matters.This is not moralistic. Research shows a child raised by a lone parent is seven times as likely to fall into poverty, four times as likely to be expelled from school, three times as likely to become dependant on welfare and twice as likely to go to prison.
These dynamics do not hold for upper income groups, where a single parent usually has the resources (and family support) to give a child a loving, stable background. It is among the poorest families that marriage makes the most difference.
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime • Parenting • Welfare benefits
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